The Son Always Rises, but the Daughter Sleeps In: A tale of OPB*

*Other People's Boogers

Saturday, December 22, 2007

Oy VEY the traffic

A quote from my Honda post ended up on the front page of Boston.com. It was only up there for a few hours but it generated some really cool commentary about cost effective, energy efficient car options. I would like to thank the kind strangers who gave me their constructive comments on car shopping.

It also garnered a lot of vitriol and spite and random kind words from an on-line community that I choose not to name here. I have a site monitor that tells me where the traffic comes from and hundreds of hits were coming from this one URL. So, I checked it out. Then I clicked off the page fairly quickly. Anonymity makes people brave and ruthless.

I am shocked. Who does that? Who would take the time to read some random person's deliberately inoffensive blog and rant about it? My stay at home mom lifestyle is apparently offensive to a lot of people. I really thought the mommy wars were in our heads, but there they were in black and white. The funny thing is that I'm no longer a SAHM. I have a real job again. I just haven't updated my profile yet.

I know this blog is fairly relentlessly upbeat. That's not because I don't have problems or trauma. It's because I don't believe that the Internets are a place to air your dirty laundry about your mom, your husband, inlaws or employers. I view this blog as a grand writing exercise in which I try for the most part to count my blessings. I've seen many boring blogs along the way that I don't like. But it would never occur to me to to take the time to slag them off somewhere else.

I didn't ask Boston.com to put my blog up there. They just liked what they saw and quoted me. This blog has been featured in the Globe before. But I think that was more due to the fact that they wanted to write about a Somerville blog, that was written by a woman, who had contact information easily accessible. I don't think there was a long list to choose from.

Thursday, December 20, 2007

Abcess Makes the Fart Go HONDA

We're contemplating replacing my car. It's 10 years to the week I got my 1998 Accord. It's only got 50,000 miles on it. But I just worry about driving the kids around in an older car.

The dilemma is whether or not to get a zippy little commuter car for Rich and I'll use the CRV for the couple times per week that I use a car. But that would be his third new car in a row, and I think on principal, it's MY turn.

We were going to look at the Honda Fit, which gets decent mileage. It gets a combined fuel economy of about 30 MPG, vs the CRV which gets about 20. But Rich and I are rather large and I'm not sure we'd be comfortable in it. So, I'm wondering if they make a Honda Fat?

I am a horrible energy hogging consumer, but I don't think I'd feel good about trading in my sturdy accord for a little tinny car. I also was thinking Minivan because I want to be able to drive the kids around and do some carpooling.

It's a conundrum. The thing is, I barely drive at all. I put maybe 5k miles per year on a car. So, even at $3/gallon gas the difference between 20 & 30 miles per gallon is less than $100/year. but when I need a car, I really need to get somewhere, so becoming a 1 car family would be kind of hard at this point. And there is the guilt that if I buy a gas guzzling minivan I will singlehandedly turn the planet into a bubbling cesspool before my kids finish high school. But at least I can carpool them there, so I think one minivan would be better than 2 sedans going to the same place...

I'll probably go around and around this thing in my head until the year ends and the super cheap lease deals are all gone.

Monday, December 17, 2007

Ice 101 for Preschoolers

"You said to be careful. You didn't say to WALK." Next lifetime I'm marrying a poet, not an engineer :-). Damn literal children.

Today:

"Eric, it's solid ice out there. I want you to walk carefully to the back porch."

I didn't say 'directly' to the back porch. Boy proceeded to climb straight up a snowbank that we have behind the back deck. Kaylee and I get our coats and boots off. I shout out the back door, "Eric get in here NOW!" Then the daughter starts for the stairs hollering "Night night, kee kee!" Meaning, "I would like my nap and my pacifier now, please Mommy."

So, I left the boy in a snowbank, ran up to the third floor, tossed, well not tossed but put down very quickly into her bed and flew down the stairs.

The boy is flat on his back, flailing and yelling in the driveway. Two small tootsie pops later, he is good as new, with a nasty looking lump on the back of his head.

"I WAS walking to the back porch!" he wailed. I guess I didn't explicitly say "Don't go by way of a frozen snowbank behind the deck."

Sunday, December 16, 2007

Women't Aren't Buying Clothes This Holiday Season

And I know exactly why.

The Times published an article today saying that the sale of women's clothing is down 6% over this time last year. They blamed it on housing prices, the economy, and the "sameness" in the stores. That's not the half of it.

I went shopping at Ann Taylor a couple weeks ago for slacks and tops, aka "dress pants." My new gig doesn't allow jeans and I'm not slogging through the snow in my nice skirts. Most of the tops I saw were Christmas red, white or black. There were very few blues and there were a few hideous hounds tooth checks that would make Elle Macpherson look like an ugly sofa.

But Ann Taylor should be truly ashamed of the pants. For starters, the buttons are sewn on badly. Even though they fit me fairly loosely in the waist, the buttons are already coming off, less than a month later. There is way too much fabric in the legs, both length and width-wise. I did find a 'petite' pair that doesn't wrap around my feet when not cuffed, but I'm not quite short enough for the petite cut. And at 5'6" I am too short for the normal ones. I wonder what Amazons (besides my sister who is made entirely out of legs) would fit into the "L" size.

But worst of all, these freaking pants have no pockets. Or rather they have very tiny little back pockets that are too small for much more than a credit card. And there are no front pockets.

This brought on the giantest WTF the first time I needed to run around my building. I'm supposed to have this Treo with me wherever I go, and there's nowhere to put it. Plus I need my ID to get back into my office and these diminutive pockets just aren't cutting it. These pants are SO sexist. Men's dress pants have plenty of room for a wallet, and a phone, but I'm supposed to carry a f*cking purse downstairs to get a cup of coffee.

Needless to say I was not running back to Ann Taylor to buy some leg-fatmaking, tiny pocketed pants. So, to all your women's retailers out there, I give you the big "Duh!" Of course your sales are down. Your clothes are ugly, boring and impractical.

About Me

My name is Margaret, but people that knew me before 1988 usually call me Meg. I grew up in The People's Republic of Cambridge and I used to live next door in Somerville. (Which is much cooler than Cambridge these days despite a conspicuous lack of public green-space). I graduated from Sarah Lawrence College in 1992, and to this day I have mixed feelings about that. I I'm married to a fabulously handsome and kind man and I have 2 really neat kids. We also have 2 cats and live in a Victorian in Melrose with a huge porch. I consider myself the luckiest person in the world most of the time. I have a lot of love and stability in my life. It may be unearned, but it is reciprocated and appreciated.